I love teaching during an election year. Most of my students are voting for the first time in their lives, and it is my job to explain to them the significance of their vote and, I hope, inspire a new generation of voters. Nothing is more rewarding than discussing the voting process and results the days after the election. Excited students enter the classroom comparing notes on whether or not their polling stations had long lines, how they felt when they submitted their ballots, and if they noticed any demographic patterns, be it race, class, or age.
This year is a bit different. Many of my students do not feel invested in or confident about either candidate. My Democratic students are “with her,” largely because they feel that the real-estate mogul Donald Trump is a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, misogynistic charlatan, and they fear that he would be devastating to our nation and our allies if elected.
My Republican students are quite torn. They refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton for a host of reasons, they say — email servers, overall untrustworthiness, her foreign-policy record, among others. However, they don’t believe that Trump adequately represents their party or ideas. They are also concerned that a vote for Trump would signal that they too are racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant misogynists.
With the finish line in sight for the presidential campaign of 2016, we decided to devote our pages to essays that examine and challenge the way we think about politics, democracy, and the American electorate. Why do voters make the choices that they do? How could political scientists have failed to foresee this year’s tectonic political shifts? And what aftershocks can we expect in the wake of Donald Trump? We tackle these and other questions in this special issue of The Chronicle Review.
Neither candidate is perfect, and neither inspires my students. However, this is the first election year where both Democratic and Republican students feel like a vote for the Republican presidential nominee is a vote for explicitly exclusionist politics and rhetoric. Which poses a dilemma for the educator: How does one teach fairly and dispassionately an election campaign in which one of the two candidates regularly spouts rhetoric and ideas that many consider offensive?
F or starters, one must cast today’s events in the context of a longer, continuing narrative. I remind my students that Trumpism and the millions of supporters who have rallied to its cause are not new to America or American politics.
Many students instinctively compare Trump to Hitler or Mussolini. However, many of Trump’s views actually have roots in American soil. His politics can be traced back to the likes of Gov. George Wallace and Sens. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond. They preached and practiced exclusionary politics based on race, religion, and nationality.
By historicizing the statements of Trump and the exclusionist beliefs of many of his supporters, the fervor for Trump begins to make more sense. Bringing Trump closer to late-20th-century politics, I remind students that Ronald Reagan declared his 1980 candidacy in Philadelphia, Miss. — the city where the civil-rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964 — thus sounding a dog whistle to supporters about his beliefs on race, as well as law and order.
I also show the incredibly successful Willie Horton ad used against the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, in the 1988 presidential campaign. The Horton commercial is in many ways the gold standard for a racialized attack ad in modern political elections.
I don’t use these examples solely to make the argument that Republicans in the past have employed racist campaign practices. Rather I use these examples to illustrate the long history of race and racism in the American electorate and the ways in which voters have responded to covert and overt racialized tactics in election cycles.
I have the privilege of teaching at a Jesuit institution with both Democratic and Republican students. But whether you teach at a conservative-leaning large university in a “red state,” or a small liberal-arts college in a deep-blue one, we all share the fundamental experience as educators of trying to create a productive space for our students to think about current events as well as theoretical concepts. It is imperative to recognize that some students are truly frightened by not just Trump but his supporters as well. But it is still possible to create a safe space within the classroom to dissect why Trump’s message appeals to so many voters.
Trump’s speeches and loosely defined policy platforms have sparked robust discussions in my classroom — about race, class, gender, religion, immigration, the First Amendment, the limitations of a presidency, the elasticity of the Constitution, and the framers’ intentions. Many of my Republican students feel like they are without a party this election year — a perfect opportunity to explain party realignments in American political history. Without cosigning Trump’s rhetoric, we have used his words as the starting point to discuss issues and concepts that go beyond the man.
Make no mistake: It has been difficult to remain neutral, fair, and balanced when discussing a candidate who consistently insults large swaths of the American public, my racial and ethnic group included — in his words, “the blacks.” But painful as it has been at times, it is possible — indeed, it is necessary — to discuss why Donald Trump and his message resonate with so many Americans.
Christina M. Greer is an associate professor of political science at Fordham University and the author of Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Oxford University Press, 2013).
